Most people enjoy eating and drinking acidic foods and beverages (referred to generically herein as "food" or "foods"), where pizza, coffee and wine are common examples of popular acidic foods. However, for some people, the ingestion of acidic foods has undesirable consequences. For example, the acid in acidic food such as wine is perceived as a sharp taste, or bite, when that food is taken into a consumer's mouth. For some people, acidic food has too much bite, and thus is less palatable than would be preferred. Also, some people suffer from heartburn after ingesting even moderate amounts of acidic food. A problem attendant to ingesting large quantities of acidic food is that the consumer's stomach may reach dangerously low pH levels over an extended period of time, because of the sheer quantity of exogenous acid ingested, and this can lead to ulcers or other gastrointestinal tract ailments.
According to one medical dictionary, heartburn is an esophageal symptom consisting of a retrosternal sensation of warmth or burning occurring in waves and tending to rise upward toward the neck. It may take the form of water brash, where water brash is heartburn including regurgitation of sour fluid or almost tasteless saliva into the mouth. See Dorland's Illustrated Medical Dictionary, 28th Edition, 1994 (W.B. Saunders Co.). When people develop heartburn, they may ingest antacids, that are available over-the-counter, to help neutralize the stomach acid.
For some people, heartburn is the almost inevitable consequence of ingesting certain food, and particularly acidic food. Thus, for some people, drinking coffee inevitably gives rise to heartburn. At present, these particular people must either forego drinking coffee, drink coffee substitutes, suffer from the effects of heartburn, or resort to treating the effects of heartburn by, e.g., medication. None of these options is particularly satisfactory to people who like to drink coffee and ingest other acidic food, but who are particularly susceptible to ill-effects attendant to a decrease in the pH of the stomach.
While the prior art has given much attention to the treatment of heartburn and other ill-effects caused by eating acidic foods, little attention has heretofore been given to developing methods and compositions that reduce the incidence of the problems and unwanted effects caused by eating acidic food. For example, little attention has been given to providing a milder taste for acidic foods, or to preventing the formation of heartburn and other gastrointestinal distress caused by ingesting acidic foods. There exists a great but unmet need for a method to treat acidic foods so as to make them more palatable, and to reduce or eliminate their tendency to give rise to heartburn and other conditions caused by an excess of acidity in the stomach of a consumer.